25th January 2017, 22:11 Edited(This post was last modified: 3rd December 2017, 13:18 by Dah65.)

Hi! First of all, thanks for Netrunner and Maui (the latter is the distro I currently use).

I would like to switch to Netrunner Desktop, because I like very much Debian (which I used before), and the idea of having a rolling distro.

But when I try Netrunner Desktop I am unable to connect to my wifi. I have two wifi sticks, one with chipset Atheros (module ath9k), and the other with Ralink (module rt73usb), but none of them works. In konsole I made "sudo modprobe -v ath9k", and "sudo modprobe -v rt73usb", without success.

When I read that Netrunner Destop 17.01.2 was released including some additional firmware, I downloaded the iso, but the issue still persists.

With Maui everything worked like a charm (well, maybe I had to do "sudo modprobe ath9k", not sure now), so it was a big surprise to have this trouble with Netrunner.

As you can see in the video screencast of a live session, firmware-atheros is shown with a green mark in synaptic, I have made a "sudo modprobe -v ath9k", my wifi network (ONO_7B) is properly configured, but still I cannot make the connection.

Indeed, I think it is strange that several wifi networks were detected, so I thought that the device was recognized and worked well, but at the end it wasn't.

Is the network really configured correctly? Did you get a valid ip address from the access point / router when connecting from another device?

Yes. In fact, right now I'm writing from the same PC, which has Maui installed. A laptop, dual boot Windows 7/Maui, has no trouble, as well as 2 smartphones with Android 5.

A second laptop (with Sparky Linux, a Debian Testing based distro), showed the same behaviour that Netrunner Desktop for a while, but the problem disappeared when I upgraded via ethernet. With this fact in mind, I have downloaded network-manager_1.4.4-1_amd64 and wpasupplicant_2.5-2+v2.4-3+b1_amd64 from Debian Testing repos, in case the issue were a bug in one of those two packages, and installed them in the live session of Netrunner Desktop, without success.

Which atheros chip do you have ? (You can check with the terminal command inxi -v 2)

28th January 2017, 13:36 Edited(This post was last modified: 28th January 2017, 13:37 by leszek.)

It might be a limitation coming from an older wireless package or this particular hardware in cooperation with the driver. Though I am not sure.
What you could try is disabling hardware crypto support.
To do this create a file in /etc/modprobe.d/ath9k_htc.conf with root rights (sudo) with the contents

Code:

options ath9k_htc nohwcrypt=1

Save the file and reboot.

I hope that this will fix the issue with your Wifi and that particular card.

Thanks for your suggestion. But I use this computer to do part of my daily work, so I'm reluctant to install a distro that may not function in such fundamental task.

In fact, I'm writing this post from the very same PC, in Maui Live session to verify what happens, and I can connect to my wifi with no trouble at all. So I think the issue is a bug in some package. Maybe the network-manager, because a friend of mine had a similar problem with Lubuntu 17.10, which of course doesn't use plasma-nm, in his laptop; sadly, I don't remember what wifi card was involved in his case.

All in all, I'll probably wait for the next Netrunner Desktop iso to try again.

As I've said, I think is a bug in Debian, because the same computer and wifi usb stick works out of the box in Maui Linux. Maybe I'll do another try with Sparky Linux KDE, which is Debian Testing based as well, to see what happens.

The issue described at the beginning of this thread was present as well in Netrunner 17.06 and 17.10, but recently I did a new search in the internet to look for a solution, and I found one that worked in my case.